"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Golden Handcuffs

Wordspy defines golden handcuffs as "attractive financial benefits that a corporate employee will lose by resigning from the company." I have not been able to trace the origin of this phrase in English. However, Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander 5.12.20 (tr. John Yardley), mentions some actual golden handcuffs that confined the Persian King Darius:

To allow the king some mark of respect, however, they bound him with fetters of gold, for fortune kept on devising new kinds of insult for him.